Ranting and Raving

JSPWiki/Glassfish Install (Part 2 of 18: LAN Layout)

Following a frugal strategy we’re going to try to make good use of what we already have in place. Many of these elements are common to most LAN configurations.

We have a LAN with its own DNS and DHCP server.

All the clients on the LAN are configured by DHCP running on this server. The clients can reach the Internet via our gateway (192.168.0.1) but do not send their DNS requests directly to the DNS servers operated by our ISP

Clients send all their DNS requests to the LAN DNS server.

The LAN DNS server only has entries describing a few servers on the LAN.

The LAN DNS server forwards most requests to the DNS servers run by the ISP.

We have some control over our LAN DNS entries & our public DNS Entries

We have a web server (Apache 2 running on Ubuntu Linux) with two interfaces and two static IP addresses.

LAN Interface with static IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.4 but you pick the number you want)

Our LAN DNS server will call this LAN interface wiki.example.com

When the clients on our LAN type wiki.example.com into their web browser their web browser looks up this name in the LAN DNS server and the LAN DNS server returns 192.168.0.4 to the browser which then connects to 192.168.0.4

Public Interface (DSL) with static IP address (this number is assigned by your ISP e.g. x.x.x.x it doesn’t matter what the number is you just need to know what it is)

Our ISP’s DNS will call this public interface wiki.example.com

When the clients on the Internet type wiki.example.com into their web browser their web browser looks up this name on their own ISP’s DNS server ultimately it will reference your ISP’s DNS and return x.x.x.x to the browser and then their browser connects to x.x.x.x.

If your ISP isn’t accommodating in making changes to the DNS entry for your registered domain think about using a DNS hosting service like EasyDNS so that you have control over how the outside world resolves your static IP addresses.

We have a MS-SQL server that is used by other applications on our LAN but the load on this server is small so we can use it to keep a list users who will be allowed to login to our Wiki.

If MS-SQL wasn’t already installed we could add PostgreSQL or some other database pretty easily

We have an older Pentium 111 machine with 512MB of RAM that we can re-purpose for this project.

This machine is running Windows XP

This machine will assigned a static IP address 192.168.0.5, again pick the number you want

This machine may be good for testing this assemblage of software components but is underpowered for regular use!